Halfway there, Junko sees something coming down from the sky. It lands between her and the helicopter, safely away from any of the living dead.
Scavy sees it from his seated position. His mouth drops open as he recognizes what it is.
It’s Oro’s glider-cycle.
Oro steps out of his glider-cycle and walks casually over to the helicopter.
“Just in time,” he says, wiping dust from his shirt.
He looks back to see Junko running toward him from the distance.
“Didn’t you know?” he says to her figure across the parking lot. “Geniuses always win.”
He snickers as he steps up into the helicopter.
The aircraft has no cockpit, as it is computer-controlled. The inside of the craft contains only one seat. Oro sits down in it. He puts his last cigar into his mouth and lights it up. Takes a puff, then laughs loudly.
“Of course I would win,” he says. “I am a genius. I deserved to win!
He chuckles as he sucks on his cigar. Then he looks over to his right and sees zombie Mr. T staring back at him, only a few inches from his face. The cigar falls out of Oro’s mouth.
“Gimme them brains, fool!” yells the zombie T-2000.
Oro screams as he is ripped out of the aircraft and dragged across the ground.
“But I’m a genius!” he cries. “You can’t eat my brains!”
“Quit yo’ jibber jabber,” says zombie Mr. T.
Then he bites into his skull and eats his brains.
Vine rushes toward the helicopter with paintings strapped to his back. He slices through rows of zombies, blood draining down his side, his intestines uncoiling out of his belly.
“You have to get there!” Xiu yells. “Get close enough to use your wire!”
Vine trips over his own intestine and falls to the ground. He slashes the oncoming zombies as he gets up and continues on.
Junko runs past Mr. T to the helicopter. She glances over at him as he tears into Oro’s brains with his big bright teeth. He growls and thrashes at the brains like a mad dog.
Cutting down the last zombie in her way, Junko boards the helicopter. She collapses against the seat. Her head leaning back against the metal casing, catching her breath.
As the helicopter lifts off, she turns off her chainsaw and looks down at the chaos below. The aircraft ascends high into the sky.
Below her, she can see Scavy sitting safely within the circle, protected by the lawn gnome. He waves at her, pumping his shotgun into the air.
She waves back. The motion causes blood to spray out of the zombie bites on her arm, sprinkling into the air, mixing with the falling rain.
Vine sees the helicopter flying above the hospital.
“There’s still time!” yells Xiu’s voice. “Do it!”
Vine launches his wire and it hooks onto the helicopter’s landing skid. He is pulled into the air, reeled upward. His insides spill out, raining on the corpses below, as he flies through the sky, getting closer to the aircraft.
“Finish the mission!” Xiu’s voice cries. “You can do it!”
When he reaches the helicopter, he climbs up into the cabin. Junko’s eyes light up in shock when she sees him standing there. She tries to start up her chainsaw, but can’t get it going. It’s finally out of gas.
With his one arm, Vine pulls the artwork from his back and tosses it into Junko’s lap. Then he pulls the mask from his mouth.
“Tell her in English,” says Xiu’s voice.
It has been a long time since Vine has spoke English, so it takes him a while to get the words out.
“Give these to the son of Gunther von Hagens,” he tells her.
She slowly nods at him. “Okay…”
Then he lets go of the helicopter doorway, drops backward, tumbling into space without his wire to catch him.
“You did it,” Xiu’s voice tells him, as he falls through the air, staring up at the helicopter. “You accomplished the mission. We didn’t die for nothing.”
A smile grows on his lips and tears flutter from his eyes, watching the helicopter get smaller and smaller as he falls away from it.
Scavy hollers in excitement as he watches the helicopter flying over the buildings. He waves his shotgun into the air.
“You did it!” he cries. “Fuck yeah!”
Behind him, Popcorn covers her mouth as she giggles with joy.
“Those bastards aren’t going to get away with it!” Scavy cries. “Teach them a lesson you beautiful badass bitch!”
He laughs out loud.
Then he pumps his shotgun into the air.
“Anarchy! Anarchy! Anarchy!”
But the smile fades from his lips as he sees the rocket flying up from the ground toward the helicopter.
“No…” Scavy says in a soft whisper, as the rocket hits the helicopter.
The aircraft erupts into a ball of fire and falls from the sky.
As he falls, Vine sees the helicopter exploding in the air above him. His eyes close, the tears raising into the air.
“I failed,” Vine says to the voice in his head. “It was all for nothing…”
When his body hits the ground, his brain splatters across the horde of hungry undead.
Scavy can’t look away from the fire in the sky. He can’t believe it just happened.
“Let’s go, Scavy,” Popcorn tells him.
“…what happened?” he says.
He puts his hand into his face.
“Let’s just get out of here,” Popcorn says. “You don’t want to spend your last moments as a living human at this hospital. Come on.”
Scavy lifts himself to his feet, using his sniper rifle as a crutch, and follows his ex-girlfriend out of the parking lot, to find a good place to die.
Wayne “The Wiz” Rizla chuckles to himself as he watches the helicopter explode repeatedly on his monitor. He rewinds and zooms in on Junko’s face, to see her expression as the rocket hits.
“BOOM!” he yells, as it explodes.
He laughs louder.
“Did you have something to do with that, sir?” asks his assistant, a mousy woman with too-short hair and too-large glasses.
He looks over at her and whispers, “Of course I did.”
He scans the room for anyone paying attention, then curls his finger at her to draw her in closer. She goes to him.
“Here’s a secret,” Wayne says.
He switches monitors to a different camera, then zooms up on a mechjaw with a rocket launcher on its back.
“You see this little doggy?” he says. “These things were built by the government of the USA sometime before Z-Day. Hell, they were the things responsible for Z-Day. Back then, the government would send orders to the dogs via satellite.”
He looks at the girl with anticipation.
“And?” she asks.
“And I figured out that how to hack into that satellite,” he says. “The mechjaws were following my commands the whole time!”
“You rigged the game?” she asks.
He shushes her, looks around the room, then leans in closer. “No, I just gave them a little nudge and sent them in the right direction. Those mutts would have sat around doing nothing otherwise.”
“But you had a mechjaw blow up the helicopter?”
Wayne blows a puff of air at her through his white goatee. “That’s because Junko was on it. I couldn’t let her win. That would be stupid.”
“Why would it be stupid?”
He waves away her question. “The government doesn’t want anybody winning the contest anyway. It was hard enough convincing them to allow one person to win once. They don’t want anyone from Copper moving up to the higher quadrants.”
“Then why do you bother offering them a prize?”
“Because the audience loves it when the winners get a prize. Otherwise, the contest would be just a tad bit too cruel for them.”
“So the show’s not too cruel as long as there’s a chance that the lone survivor m
ight get a prize?”
Wayne doesn’t like her tone. He frowns at her.
“Why don’t you get me some more coffee, okay?” he asks, then goes back to his monitor.
She nods. As she turns, she catches a glimpse at a picture on Wayne’s desk. She does a double take, then looks closer at the image. It is of a young girl, about fourteen years old.
“Isn’t that one of the contestants?” she asks, picking up the picture.
“Hmmm?” Wayne says, glancing over from his screen. “Oh, yeah. The little prostitute.” Then he goes back to the monitor.
“Why do you have a picture of one of the contestants framed on your desk?”
“Hmmm?” he asks again, as if he has no recollection of the conversation. “Oh, yeah. She was my daughter.”
The assistant’s face widens at him as he goes back to watching Junko explode over and over again. She isn’t sure if he’s joking or not. How could Wayne seriously put his own daughter on the show?
Adriana was the daughter of Wayne “The Wiz” Rizla from a previous relationship. She never knew he was her father. Her mother never told her about him.
Wayne was married to a wealthy woman who held a powerful seat in the Platinum courts. He had married her for the money, but because she was so much older than him he really wasn’t interested in her sexually. Instead, he had a series of affairs with various women on the side. One woman he had an affair with had become pregnant. She wanted him to divorce his wife and raise the child with her. He refused.
When she threatened to go to his wife with the information, Wayne used his influence to get her sent to the Copper Quadrant where she would have no contact with his wife whatsoever. Several years later, his wife died and he inherited the money. That’s when he began to wonder what had ever happened to the woman he had impregnated. He was curious about whatever became of this woman and his daughter.
He tracked her down, but realized he was too late. The woman was already dead, raped and killed. A common death for a beautiful fragile woman in the Copper Quadrant. But he discovered that his daughter was still alive. She was working as a prostitute on the worst side of town. The idea that his daughter was a prostitute was not surprising to him, but it made him feel a little ill inside. He decided he might want to get her out of this life, bring her back to the Platinum Quadrant.
When he first met his daughter, she was a scrawny young girl just barely through puberty. She had been turning tricks since she was nine.
“Hello, little girl,” Wayne said to her, smiling in her bright blue eyes. “What’s your name?”
“Adriana,” she said.
Wayne brushed her dark red hair out of her eyes.
“That’s a pretty name.”
“Do you want a blow?” she asked. “Or a fuck? If you want it in the ass it will be double because I’ve got a colon infection.”
He stepped back.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t come for that. I wanted to tell you—”
“You can’t talk to me unless you pay,” she said.
“Okay, I’ll pay for your time,” he said. “I just want to talk.”
“Whatever,” she said.
After he paid her pimp, she took him into a small bedroom with a leaky roof and a mattress stained with brown menstrual blood.
“I wanted to tell you,” he said. “I’m your—”
She pulled off her shirt and took off her pants. Wayne stared at his daughter’s body. It seemed very familiar to him, yet alien. Her bony ribs popping out of her pale skin reminded him of his own body, when he was a child.
When she went to him to take off his pants, Wayne grabbed her hands.
“I’m your father,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “If you want to role play I can do that…”
She took off his pants. He was surprised to see that he had an erection. The idea of having sex with his daughter was exciting him, and the idea that she didn’t know who he really was excited him more.
“I want you to call me daddy,” he said to her, a big smile forming in his white goatee.
She knelt down, grabbed his penis with her small bony fingers, and looked up at him.
“Okay, daddy,” she said, widening her baby-soft lips.
“Now,” he said, breathing deeply. “Daddy wants to feel the back of your throat.”
For the next year, Wayne Rizla became Adriana’s best customer. He would have sex with her in every way he could possibly imagine, always demanding she treat him as if he was her father. She never had a clue that he was really her father, that it wasn’t just a sick game. Wayne relished the thought of it, every time he came inside of her.
Then Wayne came up with the idea of putting Adriana on his show. He had put many of her prostitute friends on the show before. The idea of seeing his daughter as a contestant on Zombie Survival excited him sexually. It turned him on knowing that she never knew he was her father, never knew he was the reason she was sentenced to death. It was all his little secret. His and his alone. That is, until his assistant asked him about it.
“Is she really your daughter?” Wayne’s assistant asks.
“Yes,” Wayne says. “It’s a pity she didn’t last very long…”
The assistant puts down the picture and rushes to get her boss his coffee.
“Here’s to a great season everyone!” yells the director of photography, popping open a bottle of sparkling wine. “The best one ever!”
The camera crew cheers and holds out their glasses to catch the bubbling wine.Wayne gets up and peeks out from behind his desk.
“What are you all doing?” he yells. “It’s not time to celebrate.”
“But the show’s over,” says the director. “The helicopter blew up.”
“There’s still a couple of survivors out there,” Wayne says.
“But they’re all infected,” says the director. “They’re basically dead.”
“The show’s not over until each and every one of them is dead,” Wayne says.
“Okay…” the director says, frowning. “Everyone, back to work. Let’s film the final contestants as they turn into zombies…”
As the crew go back to their monitors, the director shakes his head at the producer.
“It’s going to be worthless footage,” he tells Wayne. “There’s nothing more boring than watching infected contestants turn into zombies.”
“Not necessarily,” Wayne says.
Wayne turns and goes back to his desk. He brings up the program he used to connect with the satellite system.
“I’ll just have to send the dogs after the scraps,” Wayne says to himself. Then he sends the order through the satellite to the mechjaws, commanding them to hunt down and destroy the final contestants.
Rainbow Cat is locked in a hospital room, sitting on the floor in the corner. Behind the door, dozens of zombies try to break through. They slam against the frame, trying to tear it down, screaming out for her brains.
In front of her, a camera ball films her face. It hovers in the air, in the position she had placed it. She had brought the camera ball into the room with her for a reason. She has something to say to the people in the Platinum Quadrant.
“My husband was Charles Hudson,” she says to the camera. “He was a contestant on this show, as you surely already know. He was the greatest writer on the island. Perhaps the greatest writer who ever lived. I brought him on the show so that you would pay attention to him again. After his publisher went out of business, he wasn’t able to get any more work out there for his audience to read.”
She pauses to wipe away her tears.
“In our home, in the drawer of his desk, is a copy of his last manuscript. The greatest novel he’s ever written. A masterpiece. This novel must be published. It is probably the most significant work of art of the past fifty years. I believe this with every ounce of my soul. I believe it so much that I was willing to sacrifice my own husband’s life, as well as my life, in order to bring this book to your
attention.”
The door begins to split down the middle. Zombie fingers poke through the crack. Rainbow’s eyes widen and she begins to shake. She doesn’t have much time.
“Whoever is watching this,” she continues at a much faster pace. “If you’re a publisher or somebody with a lot of money who wants to invest in publishing this book, you must send somebody to Copper to retrieve the manuscript. You must publish it. I swear it will be worth it. Every one of you watching, I beg you to read it. I promise it will be the greatest book you will ever read in your lives. Please, I beg you. Publish his book.”
The door breaks open and the zombies spill in.
“Publish his book!” she shrieks.
Then, as she stares into the camera, she notices something off. The lens of the camera is missing. A tiny spark pops out of the top. She was so busy worrying about her message, that she didn’t pay attention to which camera ball she had grabbed. She took the one that Junko had slammed into her head. It’s broken. It hadn’t been filming anything she had just said.
Rainbow Cat looks up in a panic as the mass of zombies crowd around her.
Scavy and Popcorn walk down a street together, fifteen feet apart. Scavy limps along, using his rifle as a cane. The gnome is in his free arm with the solar-powered shotgun strapped to his back. Whenever a zombie comes near, he pulls up the shotgun and blasts out its legs. Then Popcorn kicks its face into the ground until it shuts its mouth.
“How are you feeling?” Popcorn asks.
Scavy shrugs. “In a lot of pain, I guess. Gogo sure fucked me up.”
“Sorry about that,” Popcorn says.
“It’s not your fault,” he says.
They walk silently for a bit.
“How about the virus?” she asks. “Are you starting to crave brains yet?”
Zombies and Shit Page 31
